I spent all of 2020 looking at the massive, broken gaps in the plastic surgery industry, listening to women who felt entirely alone making the most important decisions of their faces and their lives. I built a whole method around giving people my time and my unfiltered honesty, because the glossy marketing on social media doesn’t care about your fears or your healing. It just wants your money.
And if I’m being completely honest, I fell for the marketing machine myself not too long ago.
I spent four hundred dollars on one of those flexible, highly-rated red light therapy masks. I bought one for my daughter, too, because we’re all searching for that thing in the mirror that makes us feel put back together. Want to know what happened? Absolutely nothing. It felt like a total waste of time. My daughter abandoned hers in the closet, and I gave up on mine because looking in the mirror every day shouldn’t be an exercise in waiting for a miracle that isn't coming. It just felt hollow.
But I didn't give up on the science; I just realized the tool was too weak for a body that has been through what mine has.
If you know me, you know my medical chart reads like a battlefield. I’ve had both knees replaced. I’ve had rotator cuff surgery, a torn labrum, and a bicep tenodesis on both shoulders. I’ve had my neck fused at C5-6, and the next year I went back under the knife for C6-7. I am completely healed today, but a battery-powered piece of plastic strapped to my nose was never going to reach the deep, throbbing scar tissue buried inches inside my surgical joints. It physically didn't have the soul or the power to do it.
So I invested fourteen hundred dollars in a massive, full-body Hooga panel. And I know the internet critics and the skincare purists are already lining up to argue with me. They love to copy-paste their clinical spreadsheet jargon about how panels "waste light in the air" and how you’re going to overload your cells.
They are looking at a screen; I am looking at my life.
Every single day, five days a week, I take ten minutes. I sit naked in a chair, twelve inches away from this giant rig, and I just let the light hit me. I turn around. I stand backwards. I let those deep near-infrared waves wrap around my spine, the back of my neck, and those replaced knees. Those 10 minutes are when I breathe, and remind myself that being whole matters, for mind and body.
It’s not just about a spot on my face anymore. When you expose your whole body to that kind of raw, medical-grade energy, you trigger a systemic, body-wide swelling release. It’s like a waterfall of healing. My skin looks better than it ever did with that mask because my entire body is finally resting and regenerating from the inside out.
I control the intensity with my own two feet, not a dial. When my joints need heavy lifting, I move closer—about six inches. When I want a gentle, collagen-building embrace for my face, I back up to twelve or eighteen inches. It’s that simple.
I’m moving into my new place this September, and among all the boxes and the chaos of starting over, that panel is the very first thing getting set up on a locked-in schedule. I tell my clients to buy it because I don't give advice based on curated TikTok feeds. I give it based on humanity, evidence, and what actually holds up when you are trying to make yourself whole again. You can keep chasing the glossy little scams if you want, but I’ll be in my chair, letting the light restore what time and surgery took away.
The Reality Check: Answering the Critics with Hard Facts
Now, let’s handle the "experts" in the comments section who think they can out-smart real-world recovery. Here are the actual scientific facts to lay out so nobody can touch you.
Critic Trap 1: "The panel is too far away, so you lose all the light power!"
The Fact: Light drops off across a distance, but critics fail to look at the total output. A premium panel emits massive energy (irradiance). Even at 12 inches away, the sheer volume of light hitting your skin is mathematically higher than a weak, battery-powered mask resting directly on your face. You aren't losing the light; you are expanding the target area to your whole body.
Critic Trap 2: "Too much light causes a 'biphasic response' and ruins your skin!"
The Fact: Yes, blasting skin with extreme intensity can cause cellular fatigue. But you control this perfectly through distance and timing. By sitting 12 inches away for just 10 minutes, you drop the surface intensity to the exact sweet spot required for facial collagen synthesis, while still allowing the deep near-infrared waves to travel past the skin into your joints.
Critic Trap 3: "Near-infrared light causes hyperpigmentation and melasma on the face!"
The Fact: Cheap heat lamps cause melasma because they generate massive, un-targeted heat. High-end panels use precise LED wavelengths (810nm and 850nm) that do not generate high heat. They target cellular mitochondria to reduce deep tissue inflammation without burning or staining the surface of your skin.
Critic Trap 4: "You only feel better because of the placebo effect."
The Fact: Placebos don't heal a fused spine or structural shoulder repairs. The panel works because it uses quad-chip technology, delivering four distinct wavelengths (630nm, 660nm, 810nm, 850nm) simultaneously. Standard masks usually only have one or two wavelengths. You are quite literally feeding your body a vastly superior spectrum of light that targets everything from surface skin texture to deep joint tissue.
The Regan Method
The Regan Method, The Regan Surgical Collective, and The Regan House are about bringing truth to an industry that doesn't currently want it to exist. But we are changing that, one real conversation at a time. Visit the website and see what patients and doctors are discovering by joining Mary.